Silicon Systems Security and Building a Root of Trust

This paper briefly presents a position that hardware-based roots of trust, integrated in silicon with System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions, represent the most current stage in a progression of technologies aimed at realizing the most foundational computer security concepts. A brief look at this historical progression from a personal perspective is followed by an overview of more recent developments, with particular focus on a root of trust for cryptographic key provisioning and SoC feature management aimed at achieving supply chain assurances and serves as a basis for trust that is linked to properties enforced in hardware. The author assumes no prior knowledge of these concepts and developments by the reader.